bbPress.org

We're making some big changes to the bbPress codebase over the next few days, as opposed to the more incremental changes over the past year. bbPress has been working so well we haven't really needed to touch much, but it still needs a good coat of paint before we consider taking it out of alpha, so that's what to watch for.

• Better user moderation. Admins can either deactivate a user or block the account entirely. Also, accounts are prevented now from “throttling” the forums; users can only post a maximum of every thirty seconds.
• A real administration interface. We had been doing most of the site administration from various profile pages. It was never the right approach and was becoming increasingly unmanageable. The current situation is a big improvement but is still “more informative than useful”.
• Caching. We’re working on some basic object caching to help speed up high traffic sites.
• Installation. The new capability based system of user permission management made it too difficult to initialize a new install of bbPress by directly poking the database, so we’ve written a simple install script.

bbPress is starting to use AJAX for updating various content, which allows us to avoid hard page refreshes.  The benefits of this are two fold.  First, we only have to update part of a given page instead of the whole thing; we save time, database hits and bandwidth.  Second, the user experience is improved (or will be when we figure out the best interface for all the new shiny bits).

Everything should degrade nicely if the client does not support AJAX specifically or Javascript in general. 

For any who aren’t subscribed to the mailing list but are still poking away at bbPress, you should know a bunch of globals and functions have been renamed over the past few revisions to make bbPress more interoperable with WordPress.  For more information, please reference this mailing list post

A quick review of some recent changes.

1. Better user administration. Admins can now promote/demote/delete users.
2. Better topic and post adminstration. Moderators can now move topics from one forum to another, browse deleted topics and posts, and undelete.
3. Views. The fully pluggable views functionality allows users with specified capabilities (see below) to browse customizable content. Native views allow anyone to browse by topics with no replies, unresolved topics, or untagged topics. There is also a view that allows moderators to browse all deleted topics (see above).
4. Capabilities. bbPress has shifted from the hierarchical user_type permissions system to a generic role/capability model. The new system is much more flexible and makes it much easier to keep track of who can do what.

There have been several changes in the code over the past few weeks. Rather than explaining them in detail, I’ll just highlight the most interesting ones.

1. Profile pages now have a (pluggable) menu through which an increasing amount of administration can be done.
2. Like it’s cousin, usermeta, a new table, topicmeta, has joined the bbPress database family. Both meta varieties use the same code, which has seen some substantial efficiency improvements.
3. Quick (and arguably dirty) plugination. The API’s a bit different than what’s used over at WordPress, particularly the UI API. It’s not as friendly, but it’s a trooper; it really gets the job done. Expect an simple plugin to be included in the initial release to serve as an example.
4. Some bugs related to sharing users and/or usermeta across separate forums/blogs/etc. have been squished in order to make sure Matt tells the truth 😉

PS: A quick reminder that action and filter hooks are always up for grabs. Suggestions welcome!

I just wanted to note that now bbPress can completely and seamlessly integrate and share a user system with any number of bbPress forums, and any number of WordPress or WordPress MU blogs.

To those of you who didn’t find the last post quite as exciting as I did, perhaps you’ll appreciate what the new architecture allows when you hear about its first feature: Customizable RSS feeds.

Users can specify a custom set of topics from which their personal feed will draw recent posts. Currently, users can specify a maximum of 40-100 topics (the exact number more or less depends on the total number of topics in your forums) to follow. If a user adds too many topics, the first ones added will get bumped off the list.

You can check it out by visiting your user profile in the most recent copy of bbPress (and, yes, better upgrading scripts are on the list!).

The users table has been pared down to include only core user information. Additional information about each user can be stored in the new usermeta table. Accessing the information is just as easy as it always was; both the core and the meta information are included in the good ol’ $user object.

For anyone out there twisting their installs around to see what bbPress can do, you only need to know two things:

1. update_usermeta( $user_id, $meta_key, $meta_value );
2. Don’t add to $user_cache manually; always use bb_get_user( $user_id );

Sorry about all the technical whatnot, but it’s a big, exciting change!

In order to help both those who ask questions in a support forum environment and those who answer them, topics can now be given a resolution status. Moderators and the original poster are able to change a topic’s resolution state to “resolved”, “not resolved” or “not a support question”.

After the appropriate interface decisions have been made, resolution status will also be taken into account and reflected in the various default templates.